Clubhouse says it will improve security after researchers raise China spying concerns

The developers of audio chat room app Clubhouse plan to add additional encryption to prevent it from transmitting pings to servers in China, after Stanford researchers said they found vulnerabilities in its infrastructure.

In a new report, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) said it confirmed that Shanghai-based company Agora Inc., which makes real-time engagement software, “supplies back-end infrastructure to the Clubhouse App.” The SIO further discovered that users’ unique Clubhouse ID numbers —not usernames— and chatroom IDs are transmitted in plaintext, which would likely give Agora access to raw Clubhouse audio. So anyone observing internet traffic could match the IDs on shared chatrooms to see who’s talking to each other, the...

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